The scars of slavery

THIS NATION, we, committed one atrocity pre-birth and another before the ink of our Constitution and Bill of Rights had dried. We have witnessed the strain of the guilt of these vilest crimes against man and mankind on our collective subconscious and sought in vain to be forgiven, to forget and to find a blind eye to turn towards it. All three have, of course, failed.

The genocide that so sickly heralded Europe’s arrival on these continents is the one thing.

Europeans, however, desired to outsource slavery, to export slaves to islands far from home with only the necessary amount of supervision to insure function and profit, buffered from guilt by the vast, uncaring Atlantic.
The U.S. however desired a hands-on, up close and personal approach. The cruelest of the European-like slave owner, it was necessary to not just beat but totally destroy the slave into submission, eliminate any sense of family, pride, dignity or justice.

To rationalize such cruelty, the American Christian needed to delve deep into the old testament and imagine he succored on a sweet nugget of some justifying righteousness which was, in truth, the pit of a long forgotten and hideously rotten fruit dropped on the path leading from a desert of primitive savagery to the edge of a new testament of human decency.

The consciousness of that cruel past born by the lashed and their kind, and the lash wielder and his (yes, mostly his) kind, has been dragged along the road to the present, littered with the bodies of the lynched, the beaten, the segregated, the impoverished, the disenfranchised.

Along that road stand trees decorated with yellow ribbons of laws passed to ameliorate the injustices. The brilliance of those ribbons, though, fade with the passing of the seasons and tatter with the violent winds of change.

Scars, savagely inflicted upon courageous protestors and sympathisers in an attempt to render powerless such laws, can be seen today in the halls of Congress on men of great courage who still have to fight to win just a few inches more of the road; that road which leads to no finish line, no close, no end.

This is not and has never been a race. It is race against race. But some nuts continue firing, what may soon be seen as a starting gun, into the backs of dark-skinned runners.

And Old’ Man River just keeps rolling along!

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